Global biogeographic regions for ants have complex relationships with those for plants and tetrapods

On a global scale, biodiversity is geographically structured into regions of biotic similarity. Delineating these regions has been mostly targeted for tetrapods and plants, but those for hyperdiverse groups such as insects are relatively unknown. Insects may have higher biogeographic congruence with plants than tetrapods due to their tight ecological and evolutionary links with the former, but it remains untested. Here, we develop a global regionalization for a major and widespread insect group, ants, based on the most comprehensive distributional and phylogenetic information to date, and examine its similarity to regionalizations for tetrapods and vascular plants. Our ant regionalization supports the newly proposed Madagascan and Sino-Japanese realms based on tetrapod delineations, and it recovers clusters observed in plants but not in tetrapods, such as the Holarctic and Indo-Pacific realms. Quantitative comparison suggests strong associations among different groups—plants showed a higher congruence with ants than with tetrapods. These results underscore the wide congruence of diverse distribution patterns across the tree of life and the similarities shared by insects and plants that are not captured by tetrapod groups. Our analysis highlights the importance of developing global biogeographic maps for insect groups to obtain a more comprehensive geographic picture of life on Earth.


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All manuscripts must include a data availability statement This statement should provide the following information, where applicable: -Accession codes, unique identifiers, or or web links for publicly available datasets -A description of of any restrictions on on data availability -For clinical datasets or or third party data, please ensure that the statement adheres to to our policy Runxi Wang Jun 14, 2024 No No software was used to to collect data All analyses were conducted in in the R programming version 4.2.1, we we performed the regionalization analyses mainly using the R packages betapart 1.5.2,phyloregion 1.0.8,recluster 2.8; processed phylogenetic analyses using the R packages geiger 2.0.7 and picante 1.8.2; conducted spatial statistics using the R packages sabre 0.4.Research involving human participants, their data, or biological material Policy information about studies with human participants or human data.See also policy information about sex, gender (identity/presentation), and sexual orientation and race, ethnicity and racism.

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To delineate the global biogeographic regionalization of ants and examined its similarity to regionalizations for tetrapods and vascular plants, we used the most recent geographic estimates for 345 genera and 14,324 species and subspecies, integrating their phylogenetic relationships to quantify the taxonomic and phylogenetic turnover of ant assemblages in equal-area hexagon grids covering the Earth's surface, and used spatial statistics to quantify the degree and significance of biogeographic associations among different taxonomic groups.
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The ant distribution data are available from the Global Ant Biodiversity Informatics (GABI) database which includes data from the literature (both English and non-English languages), specimen information (e.g., museum and personal collections) and unpublished datasets.The phylogenetic information of ants was derived from a recently reconstructed large-scale phylogeny of ants (Economo et al., 2018) which was grafted by 100 backbone trees of 262 terminal clades from the posterior and represented the phylogenetic relationships of >14,000 ant taxa with their uncertainty.The zoogeographic regions of amphibians, birds and mammals (Holt et al., 2013) were accessed from https://macroecology.ku.dk/resources/wallace/, reptiles (Falaschi et al., 2023)   We We excluded non-native taxa and those with invalid geographic information in in the dataset; excluded taxa without phylogenetic information when calculating the phylogenetic turnover; and exclude hexagons with fewer than 5 taxa assigned as as present to to avoid potential distortion due to to small sample sizes in in dissimilarity analyses.
All analyses are performed within the R programming environment, and the code and the data for all analyses is is deposited in in the figshare repository.

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If you are not sure, read the appropriate sections before making your selection.Continuous range estimates for ant genera and species are available from the supplemental data section ofKass et al. (2022)at https:// datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.wstqjq2pp.The final dataset used for regionalization analysis can be found on Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25011866).The zoogeographic regions of amphibians, birds and mammals(Holt et al., 2013)were accessed from https://macroecology.ku.dk/ resources/wallace/, reptiles(Falaschi et al., 2023)were accessed from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19844755andthephylogeographicregionalizationforvascular plants was obtained from Carta et al. (2022), available at https://github.com/spiritu-santi/Floristic-Kingdoms/tree/main/shapefiles.Use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms.Indicate if findings apply to only one sex or gender; describe whether sex and gender were considered in study design; whether sex and/or gender was determined based on self-reporting or assigned and methods used.Provide in the source data disaggregated sex and gender data, where this information has been collected, and if consent has been obtained for sharing of individual-level data; provide overall numbers in this Reporting Summary.Please state if this information has not been collected.Report sex-and gender-based analyses where performed, justify reasons for lack of sex-and gender-based analysis.Please specify the socially constructed or socially relevant categorization variable(s) used in your manuscript and explain why they were used.Please note that such variables should not be used as proxies for other socially constructed/relevant variables (for example, race or ethnicity should not be used as a proxy for socioeconomic status).Provide clear definitions of the relevant terms used, how they were provided (by the participants/respondents, the researchers, or third parties), and the method(s) used to classify people into the different categories (e.g.self-report, census or administrative data, social media data, etc.) Please provide details about how you controlled for confounding variables in your analyses.Describe the covariate-relevant population characteristics of the human research participants (e.g.age, genotypic information, past and current diagnosis and treatment categories).If you filled out the behavioural & social sciences study design questions and have nothing to add here, write "See above." For a reference copy of the document with all sections, see nature.com/documents/nr-reporting-summary-flat.pdfEcological,evolutionary& environmental sciences study designAll studies must disclose on these points even when the disclosure is negative.
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were accessed from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19844755and the phylogeographic regionalization for vascular plants was obtained from Carta et al. (2022), available at https://github.com/spiritu-santi/Floristic-Kingdoms/tree/main/shapefiles.The geographic and taxonomic information of ant genera and species were accessed and updated until 1st March 2023.And the nature portfolio | reporting summary We